I am five minutes late to catch Julia Allison's latest publicity stunt — literally five minutes — but I can see from two blocks away that she has already drawn a crowd. There she is, at the epicenter of Times Square. About a dozen tourists surround her, and more join every minute. All around them, theater marquees and building-sized billboards jostle for attention, but they are no match for Allison.

She has asked a few friends to join her this afternoon — former hedge-fund analyst Meghan Asha, handbag designer Mary Rambin, and Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. They are all dressed in 1980s Jazzercise outfits; Allison wears purple spandex, leg warmers, and glittery eye shadow. Strains of Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" waft thinly from Rambin's iPod speakers. The four women bounce around, giggle, and shout encouragement at one another. Their audience is captivated.

Allison has enlisted a couple of cameramen to document the event. Her new Web site, xojulia.com — like her previous sites, juliaallison.com, itsmejulia.com, and juliajuliajulia.com — is dedicated to sharing almost every waking moment of Allison's life. Visitors to xojulia.com can follow her schedule of bachelorette parties and fancy dinners, see photos of her latest outfits, and read her dating advice. They can watch videos of Allison playing with her dog or horsing around with friends. If readers want an extra shot of Allisonana, her Twitter stream provides periodic updates like a postmodern news ticker.

After about 15 minutes, a police officer wanders by to bust up the party. Allison doesn't have the required performer's license, and her admirers are clogging up Times Square. No problem! The mob follows her a couple of blocks uptown, looking for another vacant patch of asphalt where she can make a scene. As we cross 44th Street, a passerby squints at us. "You guys are famous?" she asks. "What do you do?"

How Famous Are You Online?

Want to see how your online q-rating measures up to Julia Allison's? Check out the Vanity Validator, designed by Wired's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. Using Google's PageRank technology, you can scan trusted sites to measure your Internet fame on a scale of 1 (unknown) to 100 (ubiquitous). Good luck! But to make sure that your rep doesn't get confused with someone else's, add
a minus sign before terms associated with your namesake's. (For instance, if your
name is Michael Jordan, you might want to throw a - in front of "basketball"
and "Bulls".) Good luck!

Good question. Allison may not be famous by the traditional definition; certainly nobody here seems to recognize her. But to a devoted niche of online fans — and an even more devoted niche of detractors — she is a bona fide celebrity. She says that more than 10,000 people read her blog daily, and gossip sites like Gawker, Radar Online, and Valleywag detail her every exploit. An anonymous blogger has set up a site, Reblogging Julia, dedicated to parsing Allison's posts. The New York Times has profiled her, and New York magazine has called Allison — a dating columnist for Time Out New York and former editor-at-large for Star — "the most famous young journalist in the city."

But with all due respect, Allison's renown has little to do with her day job. Indeed, it's hard to describe exactly what she's famous for. She's not an actress or a singer or a misbehaving heiress to a hotel fortune. She hasn't recorded any meme-ready videos like Tay "Chocolate Rain" Zonday or Tron Guy or the "Leave Britney Alone!" dude. She doesn't flaunt tech knowledge like bloggers Robert Scoble or Dave Winer. She is undeniably pretty — flowing black-coffee hair, sparkling eyes, gamine physique, broad smile — but beauty alone can't account for her celebrity.

Allison is the latest, and perhaps purest, iteration of the Warholian ideal: someone who is famous for being famous. Like graffiti writers who turned their signatures into wild-style gallery pieces, she has made the process of self-promotion into its own freaky art form. Traditionally, it takes an army of publicists, a well-connected family, or a big-budget ad campaign to make this kind of splash. But Allison has done it on her own and on the cheap, armed only with an insatiable need for attention and a healthy helping of Web savvy.

"She used this medium and became unstoppable," says Choire Sicha, former managing editor of Gawker. "She just made it happen in a way that seemed seamless and kind of magical."

It's easy to dismiss Allison as little more than a rank narcissist — and many of her vocal online critics are happy do just that. But come on, admit it: You've spent a good half hour trying to pick out the most flattering photo to upload to your MySpace page. You struggle to come up with the mot juste to describe your Facebook status. You keep a bank of self-portraits on Flickr or an online scrapbook on Tumblr or a running log of your daily musings on Blogger. You strategically court the gatekeepers at StumbleUpon or Digg. You compare the size of your Twitter-subscriber rolls to those of your friends. You set up Google Alerts to tell you whenever a blogger mentions your name. See? Self-promotion is no longer solely the domain of egotists and professional aspirants. Anyone can be a personal branding machine.